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Andrew TettenbornThe Spectator |
It is clear who is the unnamed target of Labour’s rule change over political nominations to the House of Lords. When two bright but relatively...
There was something predictable in the government’s agreement last week to accept defeat in the Belfast High Court. The overtly republican Irish...
It’s grim up north in Scotland, we’re told. A mission from Edinburgh has produced a report about the woes of life in the Highlands and Islands,...
Education Minister Bridget Phillipson wants to make our schools engines of ambition and social mobility. Good for her. Unfortunately, some of the the...
It’s police overreach season again on free speech and non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs. On Remembrance Day morning, we had Essex police’s...
There’s a beguiling simplicity to the idea behind Kim Leadbetter’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, published yesterday. If someone is...
Universities in the UK desperately needed Bridget Phillipson’s announcement this afternoon of a rise in home tuition fees. They will now rise from...
The East Riding of Yorkshire is flat, prosperously agricultural and slightly off the beaten track. Deeply conservative, it isn’t the place you would...
The firearms officer Martyn Blake was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba this week. Kaba was a serious wrong ‘un: a violent gangland enforcer with a...
Adam Smith-Connor was this week convicted of a heinous offence, slapped with a conditional discharge and a costs order for £9,000. The actual crime...
In Labour’s manifesto this year, Keir Starmer cannily sought to reassure any Brexiteers out there by ruling out a return to the EU single market....
Nobody should be surprised that Boris Johnson favours a referendum on leaving the ECHR, as his book now makes clear. Boris is an instinctive populist...
The fees English universities are allowed to charge home students in England are fixed by government fiat. At £9,250 per year, they are some of the...
There are not many women in prison, but those who are inside show worryingly high rates of mental illness, suicide and self-harm; their families...
The fleet of border control cutters responsible for patrolling in our waters (and at times for dealing with irregular migrants on them) is showing its...
Our universities are in a mess. Too many degrees lack intellectual quality and utility, and leave those doing them with little but disappointment and...
The decision to scrap one or two-word Ofsted inspection grades for England’s schools is good news for teachers – but bad news for just about...
It’s a curious political world. Few who voted Labour last month actually wanted Labour policies, or for that matter had more than the haziest idea...
It’s a curious political world. Few who voted Labour last month actually wanted Labour policies, or for that matter had more than the haziest idea...
The longer it continues in office, the more reactionary and beholden to vested interests this government turns out to be. So far it has surrendered to...
The Labour party is in a bind over cars. Its instincts – collectivist, green, managerialist – strongly favour anti-car measures like low traffic...
University hopefuls trepidatiously opening their official A-level emails this morning will on the whole be happier than last year. All the indications...
The riots of 2024 will be remembered for many things. One of them is the way the establishment spectacularly closed ranks on online speech. ...
The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David...
Authorities encountering the kind of civil disorder that has marked the last few days in Britain are best advised to keep a cool head and quietly...
Yesterday evening, the government instituted a little-known procedure called the Additional Courts Protocol. Set up following the 2011 London riots,...
Universities fought tooth and nail against plans to impose fines if they failed to uphold freedom of speech. That proposal – contained in last...
Nobody said much about it before the election, but the new government inherits a ghastly financial problem with the higher education system. Rising...
The prison sentences passed on the Just Stop Oil protesters who immobilised the M25 – five years for Roger Hallam and four for the others – were...
The botched assassination attempt on Donald Trump could well generate a wave of sympathy that helps waft him into the White House in November. Another...
Life in the Berlaymont building, the Brussels headquarters of the European Union, just got a bit more surreal. A striking feature of the EU is its...
If you gaze south from the sarsens of Stonehenge, your view at present is of a constant crocodile of cars and caravans grinding along the nearby A303...
James Cleverly may now be a care-and-maintenance Home Secretary, but even so he will be heaving a sigh of relief as he finally tapes up the file on...
‘Britain is evolving from a democracy towards a kritarchy – the rule of lawyers,’ wrote Ross Clark in today’s Spectator magazine. His gloomy...
In this election, neither Labour nor the Tories are particularly interested in serious constitutional reform. By contrast, there’s one smaller...
If anyone thought our relations with the EU since the Brexit referendum would be a respectful dialogue of equals, they were quickly disabused....
We are set for another high-profile tussle between Budapest and Brussels. Yesterday the EU Court of Justice chose to impose a whopping €200 million...
The Tories are pledging to reshape our homicide laws if they win re-election. There could, as in many US states, be first-degree murder for...
Rishi Sunak’s unequivocal statement this week about sex and the Equality Act was a clever piece of electioneering. Subsequent reports suggesting...
On Friday, the High Court in Northern Ireland deflected a serious threat to the right to free speech, not only in the province but also in the country...
Rishi Sunak said on Tuesday what many of us have quietly suspected for some time. As a nation, we have too few apprentices and too many university...
The Georgian parliament has rammed through its new foreign agents law amid massive protests, overriding the veto of pro-western and pro-EU president...
It has been argued that the preparedness of the courts to declare governmental action unlawful is vital to the rule of law. Well, up to a point,...
James Cleverly won’t be able to move the Julian Assange file out of his inbox quite yet after all. The High Court has allowed Assange to appeal once...
Except for households blessed with rather generous incomes, most mothers these days have to work to keep a family decently fed and housed. Some...
Last week in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, nearly 50 prominent Sikhs gathered to mark the formation of the world’s first specifically Sikh court. When the...
Before 7 October last year, observers had long suspected an uncomfortable symbiosis between UNRWA, the UN organisation tasked with organising aid to...
We might have foreseen that the movement to radicalise the art and museum world would in time come back to bite its own children. It has happened more...